This Flowchart Will Tell You What Kind Of Meeting You Should Have (And When You Should Have NONE)

Why do so many meetings suck? It turns out that, despite humans’ natural gifts for collaboration, we have some systemic bad habits when it comes to gathering for work purposes. 

The good news is we do have it in us to make meetings ultra productive. 

The bad news is, every meeting minute we waste is more expensive than we think.

Last year, a study by a scheduling company called Doodle estimated that poorly organized business meetings were responsible for about half a trillion dollars in lost productivity. A huge percent of people surveyed said that poorly organized meetings prevented them from getting work done, and that confusing meetings weakened company outcomes.

It would be easy to say that the reason for all this meeting waste is laziness. But I think the culprit is actually the opposite: hyper-productivity. We schedule meetings because we want to be more productive—to force ourselves to sit down and address problems or make decisions.

And that's the problem. We have too much to do, and too many communication tools demanding our time urgently. So what's to be done when we need to meet to get work done together?

This week, I wrote a guest post for the official LinkedIn Learning Blog about The 4 Steps For Doing Meetings Right. I encourage you to check the whole post out, but I've gotten such a great response to one of the steps in particular, that I made an updated version of it for you here. The steps, in brief, are:

• STEP 1: Choose the appropriate type of gathering
• STEP 2: “Cast” the ideal participants
• STEP 3: Prepare in order to get full participation
• STEP 4: Facilitate the meeting for productive participation

The most important step in doing meetings right, though, is the first—choosing the right kind of gathering. Instead of defaulting to a 30- or 60-minute meeting in a conference room, taking 30 or 60 seconds to decide the appropriate type of meeting can save you time, money, and frustration.

Here's a flowchart for doing just that: (click for an enlarged version)

You can download a printable poster-sized version of this flowchart here.

While you're at it, spread the love by sharing this in your LinkedIn feed, and subscribing to this Human Behavior & Innovation Newsletter Series above.

Let's make a few better meetings together—and a few less of them!

Shane Snow is a journalist and author of Dream Teams, a global keynote speaker, and creator of the Snow Academy innovation training center.